Ghost the Machine
Why I’m turning my back on social media as a force for political consciousness.
I’m not the only one.
This sensation of being sandwiched inside a multipartite conversation featuring the most ill-informed, undiscerning, morally compromised people on the planet is putting the squeeze on my sanity. Every time I pick up my phone, I feel like I’ve been psychologically strapped into movie night at the looney asylum. A realm of disharmony (social), dispute (performative), and discombobulation (of the nervous system) all part of a spinning out-of-control carousel where the screws are loose or about to come off entirely.
I’ve had enough. And I’ve decided to do something about it.
Social media fatigue isn’t especially new and most of the points I’m about to put forth aren’t particularly novel, but in 2026, a perfect storm is brewing – both out there and deep within – meaning something needs to shift.
For a while now, I’ve likened trying to discuss anything of substance on any virtual/social platform to the feckless pursuit of engaging with everyone, everywhere, all at once. Social media isn’t a “town square”, it’s more of a restaurant, one where people abruptly stand on top of their tables and begin screaming about any one of the cavalcades of horror currently besieging the world. Inside this restaurant, most of the diners don’t care about what any of these aggrieved town criers are crowing about. Many probably object to having their light-hearted meal – and preference for cute cat videos – interrupted by even the slightest screech of seriousness.
If our social media ‘feed’ is a restaurant, then it’s McDonald’s. But rather than cute trays and neatly packaged snacks, we’re all gorging from a trough pumped with infinite sludge; dopamine hits of confected slop – to which we’re all addicted, by design.
Social media arrived with the empowering promise of a megaphone. All it did was turn us into that annoyingly loud, obnoxious, incapable of reading-the-room guy at the table next to you. Because of its self-centred architecture, most of us can’t even zoom out enough to see ourselves.
Let me be clear: this is not another performative act of platform quitting. It’s more of a recalibration: preparation for what’s to come. In reading this, maybe you’ll be inspired to do the same.
Two online episodes over the past fortnight have prompted me to reckon with some sort of circuit breaker. Both speak to deeper and wider problems polluting the collective consciousness, paralysing our ability to free ourselves from the acidic spectacle of doom-loops.
It started with the virtual fake-out surrounding the so-called “invasion” of Venezuela. I’ll spare you the maelstrom of geo-political minutiae, but the current silence from the chorus of self-designated pundits and prediction merchants who knew everything just a few days ago, now speaks volumes about how far everyone missed their mark.
It seemed like we were only just opening our eyes onto 2026 when the online hysteria about an imminent war, extrajudicial kidnapping, and imperial oil grab kicked into over-drive. Half of the reactionary content spoke to fears of a superpower turned gangster State spreading its warmongering wings. The other featured elated pleas from Venezuelan expats, millions of whom have been forced abroad by decades of crippling US economic sanctions, to “stop trying to explain Venezuela to Venezuelans.” After sounding the alarm on socialist movements around the world for more than two decades (if you live in Spain or the US this may sound especially familiar), a parade of perfectly manicured faces were now telling everyone else to butt out and shut up about their own political shit-show. Never mind the brazen act of Empire or the potentially dire ramifications for the rest of the international order.
My reaction was simple: if you’re going to tell me to shut up, then I’ll simply stop listening to anything you have to say.
As the dust settled on Trump’s made-for-media special forces op, we now know there has been no real regime change (suggesting the still-in-power vice president Delcy Rodríguez likely did a deal), charges of an imperial oil grab may be overblown (most signs point to the US actually wanting to bring the Venezuelan oil reserves back under the trading orbit of the dollar to sure up their currency’s dominance and thus dent the expansion of BRICS), while all the overzealous optics (the stitched together situation room at Mar-a-Lago; the cringey, earnest declarations of America being “back” because “FAFO” – fuck around and find out) suggest the whole operation was more statement than statecraft, more performative posturing than geopolitical earthquake.
None of the one-way conversation on social media dared to entertain any of this time-tested nuance, though.
It was all fast food, digested like fast trash, forgotten quickly like the inconsequential and ill-informed noise it was.
Then came the following week’s flash in the pan: imminent war with Iran. Precipitated by mass protests. An internet blackout. Then a wave of unverified stats about hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people killed. A similar narrative arc played out: “we, exiled Iranians know best”, “we welcome foreign intervention”, “it’s a new dawn in Iran”, “beating the war drums is a good thing, actually.”
Of course, all people’s uprisings against tyrannical powerbrokers deserve to succeed. Of course, the slaughter of protestors is to be roundly condemned. However, any attempt to point out the complexities of power, inevitability of foreign interference, the targeted agendas of condensed media ownership (see: Larry Ellison and Bari Weiss at Paramount/CBS News), or simply dare to pierce the algorithmically shrunken Overton Window (the socially permissible parameters of debate), does not equate to tacit support of a regime - nor validation of basic-bitch binary worldviews of good versus evil.
Watching all of these familiar patterns unfold over the past week, I was disturbed by how The Feed was so readily furnished by fictional facts. There was such a quick descent into a circus of fantasy projection – where the omission of basic history, how power functions, and basic due diligence on the reliability of sources were all spasmodically cast aside - that no-one seemed to grasp that the endgame was the magic bullet of American missiles.
One widely shared AI slop video depicted a bird’s eye view of Iranian street protests accompanied with the (clearly unironic) caption “All Eyes on Iran.” At the time of writing this, the video has accrued over 80 million views, shared voraciously as if it were actual news: the over-stylised AI-slop aesthetic supposedly serving as some sort of stand-in for the void created by a nationwide communications blackout. It stands as a cinematic rallying cry for a version of reality we want to be; never mind the messy inconvenience of whether it actually is – or not.
The act of “spreading awareness” might sound innocuous enough, especially when there’s an entire country on the verge of liberation, but what exactly are we spreading awareness of? Fictional 3D art? Of a media blackout that allows us to superimpose our darkest nightmares? And what are we spreading awareness for? To heighten the beat of war drums and open the floodgates to a bloody, regional, intractable war?
All of this seems to belie some sort of assumption that sharing our geopolitical frustrations and fantasies on social media carries some sort of weight in the halls of political or military power. It doesn’t. Gaza showed us that already.
It does increase screen time and make META more advertising revenue, though.
More impulsive info-sharing has clouded over the past few days; an avalanche of non-sensical, over-simplified, de-contextualised, attention-thirsty, emotional noise. There were even calls to “install” the son of the Shah, whose father was ousted in 1978 because of his own brutal, torturous regime. His playboy son hasn’t stepped foot in Iran since 1979. That doesn’t sound democratic. And sorry, that’s not how revolutions work. All this naïveté points to a much bigger global problem. We haven’t just stumbled into our online fantasy world; many of us actively choosing to live there. In this irreality, facts are subsumed by feelings, interrogation sidelined by impulse, we embrace a reactive read on things, never a considered – daresay informed - response.
The Feed is not just a place for eating, though. It is a place where incentivised actors serve up their own meaty meals hoping to sway wider audiences to their illusions. In our current climate of institutional distrust, The Feed has become the go-to place for constant reframing, conspiratorial manufacture, and finger pointing. A place for piling on, virtue signalling, and the utterly unscrupulous use of fictionalised facts to muddy the waters of every single debate, thereby stifling any chance for consensus at every turn.
We already know it’s dying. The founding promises of connecting people, democratising information, and amplifying self-expression has already proven to be a farce. No-one is really “connecting” if a billion monologues talk at each other from pulpits ensconced in their own self-importance. Information isn’t democratic if it’s controlled and preferenced by algorithmic guardrails modelled on each tech-titan’s personal and political whims. Self-expression has turned into a mass-dissemination mirror where everyone just seems to be blasting their own manufactured reflection.
Knowing this, the function of social media as an equitable forum for ideas collapses onto its own landscape of lies. In practice, all it really does is provide us with the illusion of activism: sucking up our ideas, our frustrations, and our rage into a 24-hour self-vanishing virtual and inconsequential void. The act of posting might help make us feel like we are being seen and heard, but it also leaves the real culprits remarkably unscathed, the actual town square conveniently empty and silent. Perhaps this is the point: mitigating and muting any prospect for actual revolution.
In recent months, a raft of studies has shown the corrosive effect this fast-tempo slop-fest is having on our minds. Cognitive diminishment – or brain-rot – is the new canary in our psychological coal mine. The flurry of undiscerning news-sharing, commenting, and postulating in the first fortnight of 2026 has shown us the effects of this perception-bending machine in real time. A vacuum for truth, context, and action.
There are bigger forces at play, too. We already know that corporate media is conditioned by the hand that feeds it. Pressitute has become the new byword for journalists who have devolved into pay-for-play stenographers to power. But this ethical decline is alien to the social media realm; a place where everyone has always been a potential shill for the trade of serviceable opinions. Let’s call these so-called influencers, those well-lit luminaries who always have hot take on every hot topic, POSTitutes: actors who are willing to publish anything for anyone in exchange for financial sweeteners or simply more followers. As photo-realistic AI influencers start to crowd our feeds, this fantasy world will thicken and trust will fade into the stuff of fairytale.
Complicating our doors of perception even further, multi-million-dollar public diplomacy campaigns flood every digital space – making dialectical thinking or level-headed analysis near impossible. This is a problem because most people get their news from social media now. The medium is shaping the message, which is shrunk down to fit our "new age of orality” where few read, but everyone saw a reel. Governments and greedy media barons know this because they have our data. Their perversion of the information ecosystem is a deliberate top-down tactic to delay and disperse any prospect of accountability, to allow entrenched power to carry on with impunity. Again, as Gaza has shown us, these tools are used against us like a smokescreen that muddies the conscience of the world.
No surprise then, that the pariah state of Israel recently approved a 400% budget increase in its overseas influence operations (also known as hasbará), which includes sizeable allocations for paid content creators to echo psycho-engineered talking points. The US just approved $1.6 billion for anti-China propaganda with the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund.” Expect more over-earnest performances from the “hot-take economy” and more AI slop videos to flood your screens soon.
In the age of mass surveillance, we also know that everything we post, like, and comment on is being gathered into some sort of politico-psyche profile, which could potentially be used against us. At best, the daily data dragnet is just part of a targeted marketing machine that personalises the sale of more stuff. At worst, its being gobbled up by the likes of pre-crime obsessed Palantir to determine whether we are “good” citizens or, in the case of the United States’ recent proposal to request five years of social media history for all inbound travellers, “good tourists.”
With so many controls, hidden rules, and the ideological oversight of unfavourable opinions, for anyone even the slightest bit politically conscious, the experience of social media’s “restaurant” feels like being forced to eat humble pie under the stairs.
The fact that so many of us keep eating there, highlights how addicted we are to our handheld dopamine-slot-machines. Many of us can’t even fathom lives without them. Afraid to admit that this has become the central axis of addiction in a toxic culture built around sating our worst fears and plucking our pleasure impulses.
I hate to say it, but in 2026, our nerves are about to be put to the test even more.
There will be more conflicts. More confected dramas. Systems will be strained, some will collapse. With the 250th anniversary of the U.S-of-A. this year, you should be mentally preparing for plenty more power projection and geopolitical fantasy football. The Trump administration 2.0 has a clear plan to demolish the post WWII international order and remake it in their own image. This neo-colonial, might-is-right, Cold War 2 plan is already underway. Instagram and TikTok may be trending with a cute throwback about 2026 being the new 2016, but such nostalgia-farming can also be read as a coded warning to buckle up: more unfathomable madness is on its way.
So… what to do, what to do?
My first point of re-order is to change my rules of engagement with the info-swamp.
From today, I will no longer be sharing any political content on Instagram. No stories, no reposts, no comments, no discussion. None of it. The realm of fantasy can’t serve as the vector to understand reality. And with so many paid actors turned orators flooding the feed, I’m more convinced than ever that you can’t talk butterfly to caterpillar people.
All my opinions, musings, and attempts to expand perspectives will hereby be redirected to Substack instead. I prefer to connect with the engaged few on this platform rather than the passive many elsewhere. In the near future, this might even see me sharing more visual content such as my many useful screenshots or memes in Substack’s ‘Notes’ section. But let’s see…
As a result, The ColourFeel Dispatch might become more active this year. However, I will continue to ensure everything honours my founding promise of only sharing information that helps to shift and enrich perspectives.
The social media swamp where @madcity_dispatch is currently adrift will henceforth serve as a gateway reflection for whatever happens here. A shadow of its former self.
I’ll also be making a more concerted effort to cultivate proper dialogue in real-world formats – at dinners, talks, and events such as Another Future Festival – because I still believe that building and conversing with micro-communities is the only effective way to move us all towards a more enlightened direction.
This has been a long time coming. Four years ago, Instagram arbitrarily deleted the ColourFeel Instagram account with an unspecific charge of having violated community guidelines. I was shocked because @colourfeel_timeandspace had simply been a static gallery of coloured tiles with playfully written colour theory captions. I had never envisaged ColourFeel as a made-for-social media venture so the account had mainly served as a launchpad to my creatively designed website and for publishing occasional stories of ColourFeel events. Then suddenly it was all gone. I was given no path for recourse, there was no customer service rep to call, just a full-scale automatic erasure of what was, in effect, my business website.
At the time, it felt like having my restaurant table and seat ripped out from under me, then looking around to suddenly realise there had never been any staff to ask why?
How had we all been eating here, depending on this faceless restaurant, for so much - and for so long? The capricious deletion of my account forced me to re-see this restaurant for what it was, though. Behind the curtains of this fast-food joint packed with paid jesters, all jostling to suck the energy out of the room and the fire from the street, sat a cold, inhumane, manipulative, automated extraction machine.
Years later, the invisible hand that feeds us seems to have tightened its grip: nowhere to be seen, yet still everywhere, calibrating every meal, conditioning each plate of perception.
I’ve had enough of feeding systems that are so obviously designed to deflate our spirits, to corrode discourse, to deprive us of any hope for true connection.
This is me saying no to The Feed that is feeding on us. No to furthering fake consumption that actually starves us of from the prospect of urgently needed political consciousness.
And to you, I say: stop eating the slop at this shitty restaurant.
Redirect your energy to people and places worthy of your time, that are favourable to your life force.
In 2026, as things start heating up and the sycophantic cogs whir into overdrive, we should all consider breaking free from this toxic engine room.
It’s time to ghost the machine.
The ColourFeel Dispatch is written by a souled human being. No LLMs, predictive text, or algorithms were employed in the making of these narratives. All ideas are received rather than formulated, all thoughts shared not targeted. The above words have been thoughtfully tailored for your inspiration, enjoyment, and ongoing expansion.